Blog Promotion Tips from Darren Rowse

Can you make your blogging hobby a full time job? Really - the job that pays your bill and provides satisfaction from your performance results? While many of you would be skeptical, basing the lack of belief that you will ever acquire such status, there are already professional bloggers, who converted the blogging obsession in a full-time successful career. Darren Rowse is one of these lucky successful individuals, who started his blogging career from scratch in 2002 and became a prominent blogger several years later. His well-known website Problogger is dedicated to helping other bloggers learn the skills of blogging, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium. You can review his blogging books, like 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook, released in 2009, for example, but this post is not about promoting these tutorials, no matter how good they are, since we dedicated our resources to the exclusively free opportunities. Not exactly free, since you spend your time, which is also cost money…

The strategic suggestions for this post are originated by Darren Rowse posts and summarized by MagikWidjet. And using Darren's name in the title of the blog post actually illustrates one of the promotional techniques.

Obviously, when you write a blog post, you'd love for it to rank high in the search engines. So maybe you optimize the title and the meta tags and the post copy around a keyword phrase. That works, definitely. But you can do much better if you take this a step further.

Think how people search. These days, every time you use Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the other search engines, you can quickly be crushed under 185 tons of irrelevant garbage. You have to get very good at search, or you will get discouraged by poor results and waste a lot of time.

So what do experienced searchers do?

Simple. They search terms which REALLY narrow down their results. An experienced searcher would not just search the obvious keywords they are looking for. They would also search other terms combined with that keyword to really narrow down the search and get much more targeted results.

Use this to your advantage:

• Include the source of the information (website, news agency, etc.) in the copy of your post.
• Put exact names of people, products, brands, & businesses into your blog posts, not just content.
• Use bullets (more keyword phrases) to quickly hit every point that you want to illustrate.
• Choose only 1 or 2 social bookmarking links (Digg & StumbleUpon?). Make these links REALLY stand out!

Interesting bit of insight from The Daily Rundown, a website which has disappeared, but which was cited by Darren Rowse:

‘28% of Google searches are for a “product name”, 9% are for a “brand name” and 5% are searches for a “company name”. “Brand” keywords also have a 8x higher ROI than generic keywords. Not sure if that is for all searches or just consumer-product related searches, but either way it demonstrates the importance of making sure your site shows up on the SERPs for your brand.’

Include these names in your title, your copy, your meta description, your keyword tags, & your image tags. Your blog posts will get much more love from the search engines.